Word Type
This tool allows you to find the grammatical word type of almost any word.
- mate can be used as a verb in the sense of "To match, fit together without space between." or "To copulate." or "To pair in order to raise offspring" or "To arrange in matched pairs." or "To introduce (animals) together for the purpose of breeding." or "To fit (objects) together without space between." or "To win a game of chess by putting the opponent in checkmate"
- mate can be used as a noun in the sense of "A sexual partner." or "The other member of a matched pair of objects." or "A ship's officer, subordinate to the master on a commercial ship. In naval ranks, a mate may also be, or be subordinate to, a particular non-commissioned officer (e.g. Boatswain's Mate, Gunner's Mate, Sailmaker's Mate, etc)." or "Short for first mate." or "A technical assistant in certain trades (e.g. gasfitter's mate, plumber's mate); sometimes an apprentice." or "A friend, colleague etc.; an informal and friendly term of address to a stranger, usually of the same sex. Often used in direct address to any male." or "(in combination) a fellow, associate, colleague, or someone with whom something is shared, e.g. classmate, shipmate." or "Short for Checkmate." or ", an aromatic tea-like drink prepared from the holly yerba maté (Ilex paraguariensis)." or "The abovementioned plant; the leaves and shoots used for the tea"
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Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
